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Tales of a 43 Year-Old Runaway Valerie Allison-Roan Susquehanna University

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Tales of a 43 Year-Old Runaway Valerie Allison-Roan Susquehanna University Susquehanna University Scholarly Commons Education Faculty Publications 2014 Tales of a 43 Year-Old Runaway Valerie Allison-Roan Susquehanna University Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarlycommons.susqu.edu/educ_fac_pubs Part of the Education Commons Recommended Citation Allison, V. (2014). Tales of a 43 Year-Old Runaway. Life Writing Journal,, 11(2), 333-347. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Education Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Scholarly Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Life Writing, 2014 Vol. 00, No. 00, 1–15, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2014.928765 Tales of a 43 Year-Old Runaway Valerie Allison-Roan Keywords autoethnography; depression; suicide; therapeutic writing At 43 I ran away from home. Looking back it is impossible to know if I waited too long or perhaps should have fled sooner. I knew exactly what I was doing, but a lot of my friends and family believed the lies I told them about leaving in order to pursue my professional aspirations. They thought I was going away to be the college professor I had always wanted to be. But I knew my primary motivation was leaving where and who I was, not being somewhere and someone new. I had to get away from my father. And the only way to do so was to tell others the time was ripe for me to leave my job as an elementary principal in favor of a professorship as a teacher educator 2,000 miles away. Over the previous two years I had become trapped as the primary caregiver for my chronically depressed father and was being held an emotional hostage by his repeated attempts on his life. Before my dad’s downward spiral, I would have argued that I was the author of my own story: that I had and would maintain the course I had set for my personal and professional life. More recently, I have come to appreciate my story’s interdependency, the ways in which it is written through intersections with others (both intimates and strangers) and their stories. Each day the context of life stories me, revising in a ‘dialogical give-and-take process’ my identities and relationships with others (Eakin 100). As John Wall posited, ‘My narrative includes my story with others. Whether I like it or not, my time in the world is shaped by others in the near and distant past’ (78). Not only was my transition to a new community and identity a reaction to a familial and personal crisis; once in my new context, relationships with others and my selves from my earlier life shaped my efforts to narrate a new life. Relationships with others, as Wall puts it, have the power to constrain or expand individuals and their courses through life (59–60). In my case the others included family, friends, and associates, as well as strangers I came to know only through their written work. © 2014 Taylor & Francis 2 ALLISON-ROAN Following are four creative non-fiction vignettes I wrote over a four-year period beginning in 2009. They describe pivotal moments in my life’s intersection with my father’s depression and eventual suicide. Weaving together the vignettes are my explanation and analysis of how my father’s depression and suicide attempts impacted my entry into academia. I describe how I experienced his death within broader personal, familial, and social circumstances. I conclude by interrogating how his suicide and the context of my family and new life constrained my grieving, impacting my healing. The vignettes originated in response to my compulsion to make a permanent record of what I had lived through. Paul John Eakin would assert the drive to write was a means to ‘face down’ my father’s and my own mortality (129). At the time I did not imagine the vignettes would have an audience beyond—someday—my children. What I knew was a need to speak my truth, even if it was not heard. Much later, through considering Louise DeSalvo’s writing, I recognised the personally therapeutic value of my writing. As I began the work of making sense of the vignettes, I was influenced by Carolyn Ellis’s and Lauren Richardson’s autoethno- graphic work, particularly those occasions when they wrote narratively about their lives and then revisited the narratives with analytical lenses informed by their expertise in communication, education, and sociology. My analysis is informed by Ellis and Richardson, as well as by authors in psychology, religion, and writing. Below the first vignette, ‘Entangled’, describes my unanticipated recruitment as my father’s keeper. Prior to that moment I had lived with an illusion of my independence from my family of origin. Entangled Until the morning of June 26, 2006, I had functioned with measured detachment to my father’s and my stepmother Judy’s aging and what I saw as associated maladies. I had noticed Judy’s declining reasoning skills and memory, but I had not considered the consequences for my dad in living with her. Likewise, I had noted Dad’s slowing and his increased fixation on his ailments—which I much later recognised he read as foreshadowing a downward spiral into a life of dependency. I had my own concerns: four children to raise, a career to manage, a husband to attend to, and a dissertation that needed to be finished before the start of the school year. I never imagined my dad and stepmother, who had made the barest of effort to support and nurture me as a child or through tribulations of my adult life, would become my obligation: that I would be summoned and feel compelled to care for them. At around 6:30 a.m. I received a phone call from Judy. In hushed voice she reported my father had woke her in the middle of the night with a pistol in his hand. She claimed he had told her he wanted to kill himself and said he had a bullet for her as well. She told him she didn’t want her bullet and somehow talked him into giving her the gun. Once she had it, she hid it. But now she couldn’t remember where, and she was scared he might find it. TALES OF A 43 YEAR-OLD RUNAWAY 3 Despite my tumultuous, painful history with my dad and Judy, and the dysfunctionality of their relationship, Judy’s story was unfathomable. I drove the mile and a half between our houses in a bedroom community of Salt Lake City believing Judy had dreamt the events she described, and because of her moderate dementia, she couldn’t now distinguish between dreams and reality. She greeted me at the front door and once more outlined the story. My skepticism slid away. Where was the gun? Why did Dad want to kill himself? What was his current state of mind? It was more than I could process or contend with on my own. I called for ‘back up’. First, I called my husband Michael. He was closest and would be the most confident dealing with matters involving guns. The second call was to my stepsister Jan. Of Judy’s kids she lived the nearest, 10 miles away in another suburb. Besides she was the stepsibling I would have naturally selected to weather a crisis with. Despite Judy’s efforts to keep the children of the two families from bonding, Jan and I had become sisters. While I waited for Michael and Jan, I attempted to interact with Dad. He was in bed, lying atop his rumpled bedding. Seeming to confirm Judy’s story, he lamented how he hadn’t felt well for months, how Judy’s cognition and memory were deteriorating. How was he to cope with it all? One night recently she had made him a dinner consisting of a can of baked beans and a can of green beans. It was more than he could bear! Initially, he admitted to having a gun out. As the moments passed waiting for Michael, his story shifted, he stonewalled me, and then he seemed to feign sleepiness. My efforts to quiz him were hampered by Judy hovering in the bedroom, so I turned my attention to locating the pistol. Where would Judy think to hide a gun in the middle of the night? She couldn’t recall and the more I pressed her, the more agitated she became. She sensed she wasn’t in control and she began to back pedal. She assured me my father would never really want to hurt himself or her. They just needed some rest. I should go home or to work. My dad had simply had a bad night. For my part I tried to sooth Judy by offering affirmation to all her assertions, ‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right.’ Meanwhile, Michael had arrived and was in the bedroom loudly grilling Dad about where in the house he kept his firearms and how many he had. Interspersed with smiles, head nods, and verbal comfort to Judy, I was searching the living and dining rooms—under the sofa cushions, in the china hutch, behind the stereo cabinet—every nook and cranny where a woman with dementia might hide a pistol from her suicidal/homicidal husband in the middle of the night. Judy left me in the living room to check on the ruckus Michael was raising. I opened the bench of Judy’s electric console organ and Jan walked through the front door precisely as I picked up the offending pistol and pointed its muzzle into the air above my head.
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